Innovation Is About Arguing, Not Brainstorming. Here's How To Argue Productively. Turns out that brainstorming--that go-to approach to generating new ideas since the 1940s--isn’t the golden ticket to innovation after all. Both Jonah Lehrer, in a recent article in The New Yorker , and Susan Cain, in her new book Quiet , have asserted as much. Science shows that brainstorms can activate a neurological fear of rejection and that groups are not necessarily more creative than individuals.
Brainstorming can actually be detrimental to good ideas. But the idea behind brainstorming is right. To innovate, we need environments that support imaginative thinking, where we can go through many crazy, tangential, and even bad ideas to come up with good ones. We need to work both collaboratively and individually. We also need a healthy amount of heated discussion, even arguing. So if not from brainstorming, where do good ideas come from?
At Continuum, we use deliberative discourse--or what we fondly call “Argue. So we argue. But I’m also a fan of “no, BECAUSE.” Wireless Bicycle Brake Only Fails Three Out Of A Trillion Times. Wireless technology is all around us. It’s just starting to penetrate the transportation industry, with wireless charging for electric vehicles, wireless road trains, and more. Now researchers at Saarland University in Germany are bringing wireless to one of the lowest-tech (but most efficient) transportation technologies out there: the bicycle. The wireless bicycle brake--which only works on cruisers for now--removes the need for a brake cable and brake lever, replacing them with a wireless sensor that automatically tells the brake to activate when a rubber grip on the right handle is squeezed (the harder the squeeze, the more the bike brakes).
The system consists of a cigarette pack-sized plastic box on the handlebar that sends signals to a receiver at the end of the bike’s fork. That signal is in turn sent to an actuator that turns the radio signal into mechanical power to activate the disk brake. Hermanns is currently in talk with bike brake manufacturers. These Sidewalks Are Made Out Of Toilets. Ever wonder where old toilets go to die? We’d like to direct your attention towards Bellingham, Washington, where the city is using crushed, recycled toilets to make new sidewalks.
The toilet sidewalk concoction--a mixture of recycled porcelain, asphalt, and gravel--is called "poticrete. " Bellingham is using 400 crushed toilets diverted from landfills in its sidewalks as part of the Meador Kansas Ellis Trail Project--the first project to receive Greenroads Certification, which is kind of like a LEED certification for road projects. According to the city, poticrete costs the same as using virgin materials from gravel pits (the sidewalks cost $80,000 to complete). All of the toilets came from housing facilities that upgraded their toilets and didn’t know what to do with the old ones. The Meador Kansas Ellis Trail Project went above and beyond the poticrete project to get its Greenroads certification--it also installed porous pavement to treat water runoff and put in low-energy LED lights.
The Making of an Innovation Master - Scott Anthony. By Scott Anthony | 12:01 PM March 23, 2012 A workshop attendee asked me this seemingly simple question: “So, what else should I read to learn more about innovation?” It’s a hard question to answer because there is so much high-quality material out there. And specific recommendations depend on the specific topic about which you are most curious. But in thinking it through, I did eventually end up with a highly personal list I call “The Masters of Innovation” (which appears in my latest book).
My intent was to provide a simple entry point to innovation literature by describing people I’ve found consistently insightful, distilling their key lesson to a single sentence, and pointing to where to go to learn more. To see my selections, click here. So what makes a Master? Do the individual’s ideas bring clarity to the quest of improving the predictability and productivity of innovation? These three questions lead to obviously biased selections. One natural question is, “Who is next?” 1. 2. 3. 4. The Intersection Of The Future Will Have No Stoplights. Google, as you may have heard, has built a fleet of cars that can drive themselves. Now the Nevada Legislature has passed a law to make those driverless cars road legal (they’ll have red license plates). The era of truly autonomous automobiles might be right around the corner.
And in anticipation, Peter Stone, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, has designed a new kind of traffic intersection for them. In Stone’s system, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, there are no stop signs or traffic lights. As autonomous cars approach an intersection, they “call ahead” to a virtual traffic coordinator with information about when they’ll arrive and where they want to go. A computer program at the intersection coordinates these requests and grants the cars “reservations” to use particular routes through the intersection at particular times.
Stone says this system can be very fast for travelers. What’s next? A Compound That Can Unfold To The Size Of A Football Field Could Make Hydrogen Cars Take Off. The metal organic framework (MOF), a crystalline compound, looks like simple table salt. It actually has the highest internal surface area of any known substance on the planet; If unfolded, a single MOF could cover a football field. It’s also the most porous material known to man. These are qualities that could make MOFs the key to better hydrogen cars and carbon capture and storage technology in the future. Framergy, a Texas-based startup that licensed the ARPA-E funded MOF technology, is working on commercial applications for the compound. "There’s a big energy penalty usually associated with clean energy down to the molecular level," explains Jason Orenstein, the executive director of Framergy. In carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities, which capture carbon dioxide from polluting plants (i.e. coal-fired power plants) and store it, a significant amount of energy is wasted trying to catch CO2.
MOFs could be similarly useful for hydrogen-powered vehicles. A Floating Wind Farm? A Floating Wind Farm. The tiny island nation of Malta is lagging. As a member of the European Union, Malta is supposed to get 10% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Currently, the country’s at 1% to 2%. Whoops. To catch up quickly, Malta is considering a proposal by the Swedish company Hexicon to build the world’s largest floating wind farm. It would consist of 36 turbines arranged around a 460-meter-wide platform, tethered to the ocean floor by cables. The proposed site for the platform is 11 nautical miles off the island’s northeast shore. It would be far enough away to take advantage of high ocean winds (and be more or less out of sight) yet close enough that it could be connected to the country’s electricity grid without too much trouble. Its total power capacity: 54 megawatts. The project isn’t quite green-lit yet.
The vast majority of offshore wind turbines are pile-driven into the seabed. But floating turbines have many potential advantages. The Age Of Uprisings, Brand Movements, And Ad Backlashes. Unless you’ve been on another planet the past few weeks, you already know the story of how Rush Limbaugh uttered some highly provocative remarks about a private citizen and paid for it by hemorrhaging advertisers. More than 50 had defected at last count. Putting aside the political aspects of this story to look at the marketing side of it (I can’t help it, I’m a marketer), I have to wonder: Going forward, how might this affect the way advertisers think about fundamental questions like "What do we stand for?
" And "Who do we stand with? " If brands haven’t fully answered those questions, they’d better. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned in recent months through the Rush incident, the Susan Komen and Bank of America backlashes, etc., it’s that we’re living in an Age of Uprisings. They have the will and the passion and the social media tools to wreak havoc on your brand or organization. So again, we come back to: How will marketers react to all of this, going forward?